Theo Lambertin has an antiprogram. Where interpreters like to discuss his work in terms of subjectivity, poetry, psychology, and mystery(the “French disease”), Lambertin actively disappoints such expectations. His paintings are about objectivity, they are prosaic, ironic, and they flirt with banality. Most of all, they are political, though not in the sense of trying to give direct commentaries on the current social situation. Some of the paintings consist of acrylic on photographic linen, confronting the viewer with at least two motifs. One, nearly unidentifiable, is the subject of a

The classically elegant rooms of this gallery, formerly a moated castle, offered an ideal background for this installation of recent work by Ian Hamilton Finlay. In Osso, 1987, three huge white marble blocks lying on the floor appeared to have been violently wrested from their quarry, and only partially treated—one block bears an SS symbol. (When this piece was displayed in France, it triggered such indignation that the French minister of culture was forced to cancel a contract with Finlay for a monument commemorating the bicentennial of the French Revolution.) But Finlay’s goal in this piece

It has been 20 years since a Bauhaus exhibition of this size and importance took place. The main organizer, Wulf Herzogenrath, undertook an attempt to offer a representative panorama of work done between 1919 and 1933 at this seminal institution. The aims of such a presentation are quite different today. In 1968, the first and most necessary task was to satisfy the desire for information and to republish the pictorial, architectural, and theoretical statements of the Bauhaus. Most of its participants were still alive to play the role of witness. It was necessary—and fitting to the social and